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Over a 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft. Why were most accused witches women? What's an example of a modern-day witch hunt? There are a lot of misunderstandings on the internet about witch hunts. I'm Mickey Brock, professor and historian. Let's take a deep dive and set the record straight. Jumping over to see what the folks at our high stranges are saying about witches. Secret Parsnip 5071. These are just incredible names. Secret parnip asks, "Why were people accused of being witches?" You know, the answer is simple. People were accused of witchcraft because their neighbors thought they were a witch. We often have this temptation to say they were accused of witchcraft because someone was jealous of them, wanted their money,
because there was a family feud that was going on. And I don't want to suggest that those things weren't important. They could be important. But people typically accused their neighbors of witchcraft because they thought their neighbor had done witchcraft to them genuinely. They believed that something went wrong on their farm. Something went wrong in their family. And there was someone in their life who had maybe already amassed this reputation who'd been kind of whispered about and named in the taverns on the streets. And they could say, "Hey, this bad thing is probably attributable to them." Now then we might ask, what sorts of people were most likely to be accused by their
neighbor of witchcraft? And that's what we get into questions of gender. Over on Reddit, ask historians, why were most accused witches women? And that's when we start to talk about things like the story that's told uh in Genesis 3 about Eve being initially tempted by the devil and Eve being to blame for the entire downfall of mankind. That's when we get into questions about are women more carnal, more susceptible? That's when we get into questions about the objects. The things that are usually associated with witchcraft are often things within the female domain. For example, people often say about witches that they're creating sort of potions or a poisoned beer or something that makes a child
sick. These were things that were in the domestic domain, the household, the sphere of women. Women's work often put them in a collision course with the potential allegation for witchcraft. Back on Reddit's Ask Historians, Sir Drunken the Tall asks, "How did the Salem witch trials become the face of historical witch hunts when European witch trials took place earlier and were more numerous?" That is a great question. Most people know about Salem and they know that it took the lives of 20 people, 19 hanged and one pressed to death. But what most people don't know about is the fact that Salem was part of a Europeanwide phenomenon in which over a 100,000 people were accused of
witchcraft and about 50,000 of them, the vast majority of women lost their lives. So why when we think of the witch do we think of this little town in colonial New England and not this broader European story? Well, part of this has to do, of course, with the prominence of America in pop culture. We know about the Crucible. Arthur Miller, right, made the Salem Witch Trials famous. And we have examples of lots of different types of media, movies, story books, TV shows referencing the Salem witch trials. And we just have less of this emphasis on the European witch hunts than we do on Salem. And we like to think of America as exceptional. But it was really in reality part of a much more European
story and that's how they should be understood. Let's jump over to Reddit history because we need to talk about why the witch hunts occur at all. User diff 2 asks, "What were the motivations behind the public during the witch hunts?" That's a great question and the answer is complicated because the motivations were many, but I'll try to boil it down. One of the things that really motivated the public was fear. They were afraid of harm. They were afraid of their cattle dying or their child becoming injured or not having enough food to get through the winter at a time when life could be really hard. And they believed that there were people
in their community who practice malevolent magic to harm them. And for the authorities, it wasn't just about fear of harmful magic. It was about fear of the devil underpinning all of these actions of supposed witches. The ideas too about witchcraft took a long time to develop. They didn't just come out of the ether. People had to become afraid over time. And that's partially because once you had one or two witch hunts here and there, that provided further fodder for fear that witches were active in your community. So I think that's a really big part of it, right? Smallcale witch hunts, they begin with one personal example of harm. So let's say you think your neighbor gave you the
stink eye, gave you a face, cursed under their breath, and the next day a strange patch of crops dies or your husband turns out to be impotent. That's how smallcale witch hunts start, right? Just one person gets accused. But then maybe that person gets tortured. Then maybe they name other witches. And then you as an ordinary villager are convinced that it's not just one or two witches in your community, but this entire demonic conspiracy. Let's scroll down to the comments here. Two users have a disagreement that I think I can weigh in on. Octthornne says witchcraft accusations in Europe were driven by greed and jealousy since the accused person's property would be confiscated and divided among the local authorities.
Taodbourney responds that economic motivation was not a surefire or defining characteristic of the overall witch craze and the accusations could easily backfire. So what's the truth here? Well, I have to say in this case I'm going to give it to Tybod Bourney. accusations could backfire and there's not evidence that witchcraft allegations was financially profitable. In fact, actually witch hunts were expensive. You had to pay the jailer, right? You had to pay various local law enforcement. You had to pay the public executioner. You had to buy all the raw materials of a witchcraft execution, the rope for a hanging or the wood for a burning. We have actually some records of really grizzly accounts of just how much
it cost for the coal and the tar and the other instruments of death. So profit is not a motive here. The comment too is also right in saying that these things could backfire. It is absolutely the case in certain places, the British Isles for example, that if you brought an allegation against your neighbor and said she's a witch, that neighbor could have the ability to counter sue and say this is a case of slander. I'm not a witch and in fact you owe me some sort of fine or penalty because of having this allegation that's affected my livelihood and my life. Speaking of hell and other dark things, let's take a look at a hot take over on Reddit men's rights. The user asks, "The feminist
theory that the European witch hunts were caused by misogyny can't be true because in many places most convicted witches were men. It's not rocket science." So, I have to sort of correct you on this one. If we look at Europe as a whole, the average is clear. The numbers are clear. 80% of those accused of witchcraft were women. So yes, there were male witches. And there were a few places, Normandy, Estonia, Iceland, where the majority of those accused were men. But here's the thing. In places that had a majority of men accused as witches, the witch hunts were mild. They never got intense. They never led to the fires burning for months. As more and more witches were sent to the P, they
did not involve the types of intensive demonic conspiracies you find in other places in Europe. Where men were the majority of the accused, the witch trials did not turn into panics. And that's because fundamentally when people worried about what sort of person was likely to be a witch in most parts of Europe, they envisioned a woman because they thought women were more susceptible to the ws of the devil, to demonic temptation, hearkening back to ideas about Eve that would prove profoundly deadly. So, if we go over on the religion subreddit, the jokester warlock, great name, asks, "What was the original reason for witch hunts and Christianity?" And that is such a good question. So, the story of Christianity
from really the middle ages on is a story of institutionalization, right? the church growing in its power and its structure and trying to really establish what the dogmatic norms are to try to draw tight boundaries about what counts as orthodoxy and what's heterodox, right? What's outside the bounds of appropriate religious practice. And as part of this, there's tremendous worry about heretics and this fear that heretics are those who don't just hold weird religious beliefs, but also might be worshiping Satan. And at the same time, there's a real attempt in the medieval period to try to control magic and prevent people from engaging with the supernatural in all of these ways.
Partially because people start to think that all magic, black or white, good or bad, regardless of the intent, involves a pact with the devil. And if all magic involves with pact with the devil, then ordinary people can do it. They don't have to be learned. And all of those medieval developments within western Christrysendom really set the stage for the witch hunts of the coming centuries. But how did all of those ideas add up to thousands of people being killed? Over on our history, six horoth really wants to know, how is it that there were witch trials happening in different parts of the world around the same time? That is such a good question. How do you get witch trials from Salem in the American
colonial context to Lorraine in France to parts of Russia? How do you get this sort of Europeanwide phenomenon that even crosses the Atlantic? Part of this relates to the spread of the printing press. The fact that demonological works that report on these witchcraft trials can be printed and spread across different parts of Europe. And even though of course these are different nations, right? Scotland is a different place than Spain is a different place than Germany. Elites were broadly speaking reading much of the same thing. Many of them could read in different languages. A lot of these texts are written in Latin or French or things that people can engage with. So there is this evolving body of knowledge that
makes the witch stereotype at least in the minds of elites this sort of demonic witch makes it transferable. And if you are say living in a little Scottish town and someone in your neighborhood is acting a little bit funny, a little bit weird and you go tell your cleric and you say, "I'm I'm a little worried. I think you know what has happened to my cow is a product of this person. What should we do?" that learned clergyman very well may have been exposed to writings about witch hunts in Germany and they can look at that local event and say wait a second I think this is part of this broader conspiracy of witchcraft that's everywhere and that makes it even scarier right if anybody
has heard of demonology then they've probably heard of the malas malificarum right the hammer of witches written in 1486 that this witch hunting manual that went on to become the most notorious piece of writing probably in much of European history. And the malas malfic harm is a really interesting text for a whole host of reasons, not least that it's virulently misogynist, but it's also kind of a creative text, the malas malfic harm. It also sort of has folk tales. It has a story about penis trees. You can look it up. This is true. And it is able to catch people's attention. It also talks about flying witches. It also talks about judicial processes. But it's a it's an important
text in that it gets reprinted and it helps to solidify early on this demonic witch stereotype. And this gets distributed in other places in Europe. And if someone wants to know who a witch is, how to find one, why are they likely to be women, now they have a place they can go to. We can Google it. They could read the Malas. Here's a question over at Ask Historians. Choice Standard 6350 asks, "Did witches think that they were witches?" The reason I love this question is because one of the things that historians do best is say when we don't know for certain. It's hard to answer this stuff partially because the experiences and the emotions of accused witches are often unreoverable to us.
The only testimonies we often have from the accused are confessions. Confessions often extracted under duress, under torture, or the threat of it. Things like sleep deprivation, physical tortures, and so forth. So, we can't really take the confession of a witch at face value. My history professor taught us that witches in England largely believed they were witches. I don't think that's right. I don't think we can take these confessions at face value. There might have been, you know, the odd witch or two who over the course of being tortured and asked questions about were you a witch, were you a witch, where did you meet the devil, why did you do this dastardly thing, started to
believe that about themselves. We know psychologically that can happen. But most witches from the evidence we have probably did not think that they were witches. So what did actual trials look like when you were accused? Over on Reddit ask historians, "Ironheart 777, it's 17th century Western Europe and I've been falsely accused of being a witch. Can I expect a reasonably fair trial or am I doomed to be executed? If I have the luxury of a trial, what would most likely be the best course of defense?" So this depends a lot on where you are. There's often this idea that if you're accused of witchcraft, you're totally screwed. And you know, in sometimes in places that can kind of be
true, but there was a really robust and well-developed system of trials and the law in early modern Europe. There were laws on the books about who witches were, what they did, how to prosecute them, and there were wellworn practices for actually adjudicating that question of is this person who's been accused of witchcraft actually a witch? So, when did the panic die down and what happened afterwards? Over on Ask Historians, Peep Jinx says, "How soon after the Salem witch trials did people realize it was not about witches?" So, we have two good questions there, right? When do the trials end and what happens next in Salem and elsewhere? So, if we're looking at the broad chronology of European witch hunting, the witch hunts
start to decline in the second half of the 17th century. England sends its last witch to the gallows in the 1680s, for example. In Scotland, it's 1720s. And into the 18th century, you still have sporadic trials. And it's starting to decline really for three reasons. people are becoming skeptical about the use of torture and more critical of what sorts of evidence are admissible in court. You start to have intellectual changes where people start to wonder if you really need the devil to explain what happens in the world or whether there are natural causes for that. And then you have, you know, states that become less invested in the project of witch hunting because there's more religious tolerance. There's less competition
between Protestants and Catholics. less need to prove that you are the best and most good godly kingdom. All those shifts kind of pave the way eventually for the witch trials to die down. What comes after that in Salem or elsewhere? Almost immediately after in Salem, really within the next 20 years, people are calling for the exoneration of their loved ones and they're petitioning the court to that end. Now, that's unusual. That 20-year turnover where your descendants are saying, "Listen, you said my mother was a witch, she wasn't, and I want to clear her good name." That doesn't typically happen. What does happen is people continue to believe in witches, but they find other ways of
mediating disputes in their communities and they find other answers for the misfortunes that are part of lived experience. The last stop is on our Ask Reddit. What's an example of a modern-day witch hunt type situation where the accusers have little to no evidence against the accused? Love this question. The first thing that I want to say very clearly is that people in positions of power, often men who claim to be victims of witch hunts, are misusing the term. Because the term witch hunt often means an allegation of a crime that's not possible and that the accused did not commit. So I'm often struck when we hear people crying witch hunt. This is the greatest witch hunt ever. I'm not going to name names. They
are not using that term in a way that remotely accords with the historical record in which people who were marginalized, people who did not have the levers of power at their disposal were labeled in this way. So to the question then if it's not powerful men who were the victims of the witch hunt, who is it? I think we're talking about a modern witch hunt, the way that certain communities in the US and elsewhere are branded as other and demonized accordingly is that modern example. So the way often that trans communities are treated, the way immigrant communities are treated, the language that is used by politicians sometimes to describe these folks as evil or unnatural or dangerous or poisonous or whatever, that
sort of language is dehumanizing language. That sort of language is also demonizing language. And demonization and dehumanization are two sides of the same coin. So, anytime you hear a politician say that group is evil, that group isn't fully human, that group doesn't deserve our respect, you should know that they are stirring the very, very dangerous cocktail of the witch hunts. Okay, that's enough Reddit for me today. Thank you for joining me on this journey down the rabbit hole.
